Free Deeper Than Red (Red Returning Trilogy) by Sue Duffy

into a hiding place within her. Ben had confided to Max that it was a place even her husband couldn’t enter. She had listened as Ben spoke what they both thought were his last words, through the FBI-planted microphone still attached to his bullet-pierced body as he lay sprawled outside an abandoned warehouse in Brooklyn. Her brother was already dead.
    After slow, excruciating months of healing and therapy, Ben had left for his parents’ homeland, Israel. Knowing the risks his undercover work to infiltrate Volynski’s U.S. network might visit upon his wife and children, he’d sent them ahead to Tel Aviv, before his first clandestine meeting with Jeremy Rubin’s terrorist cell of Russian saboteurs, led by Volynski. Ben’s later decision to offer his services to Israeli intelligence, specifically the Mossad, had knocked the wind from Anna and upended her jubilance over finally getting her husband back. It appeared to Max that she hadn’t yet recovered. He knew Ben had to tread lightly around her.
    In an upstairs room off-limits to everyone else in the family, Ben closed the door, turned out the lights, and flicked a few switches at a bank of communications equipment Max found antithetical to the Stradivarius he usually commanded.
    “Moshe Singer uplinked this to everyone just minutes ago under flash code, and he wants immediate feedback.” A grainy image appeared on a screen Ben lowered from the ceiling.
    Singer, their immediate Mossad chief, was no excitable alarmist. Max knew that this had to be real and pressing. “You’re looking at a Ural mountain range,” Ben informed as he zoomed in on a high mountain plateau pocked and oddly barren for the region. At the top of a switchback trail snaking up from the valley floor was a line of old canvas-covered army trucks that looked like props from a World War II movie. At the front of the line, though, backed up to what appeared to be a broken-down mine shaft, was a late-model tractor-trailer rig with enough antennae on top to rival a NOAH weather station. Only Max didn’t think they were gauging wind and humidity. “Singer doesn’t like the looks of this.”
    “What does he think it is?” Max asked.
    “He’s not saying. Just wants to know if any of us have come across anything like it in that region.”
    Max shook his head. He’d been tasked with searching every available satellite image for signs of his father, whom Israel was eager to chat with. One of the country’s most notorious moles, planted inside the Israeli Defense Department decades ago by Volynski, was ripe for interrogation. But Max had seen nothing with a visual footprint like this.
    “There’s no more mining in that area,” Ben informed. “While you were on the phone with Liesl, I did a quick read-through on the region. By the way, is she okay?”
    “I believe so. It’s hard to tell with Liesl. She’s got a backbone as rigid as that mountain range.” He looked hard at the screen. “The ground around that mine entrance is pretty well chewed up. Lots of vehicular activity. And not all of it heavy trucks.” He pointed to several small cars parked in the shade of a single stand of gnarled trees. Then he spotted a small cluster of what, from above, looked like flat disks on the ground, but the shadows they cast proved otherwise. “Look at this.” He moved his finger just outside the shade of the trees. “Barrels.”
    “Of what?” Ben wondered aloud. Then he glanced at Max with a flash of amusement. “And by the way, just how does a violinist morph into a know-it-all spy?”
    Ordinarily, Max would have zinged an apt reply, but his first thought was too sobering. “Genetics.”
    Ben’s grin faded and he openly studied this fellow Jew who completed the other half of the notably “odd couple,” or so their Mossad associates had dubbed them. The White House bureaucrat and the symphony hall fiddler. What could they possibly bring to the venerable brotherhood of Israeli intelligence? For